The White House stated on Friday that progress had been made in the Cairo talks toward a Gaza truce, and it urged Israel and Hamas to proceed.
The White House verified that senior official Brett McGurk and CIA chief William Burns were participating in initial talks that began on Thursday night.
“There has been progress made. We need now for both sides to come together and work towards implementation,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “The preliminary talks that we had going into Cairo last night were constructive in nature. So we want to see that same sort of momentum continue here over the next couple of days,” he said. Reports claiming that the diplomacy was “near collapse” were untrue, according to Kirby.During his visit to the Middle East this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that US proposal to close gaps and bring the over 10-month conflict to a truce was supported by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Kirby stated that despite Netanyahu’s right-wing insistence on Israeli troops remaining on the Gaza-Egypt border, which has caused friction with both Washington and Cairo, the United States remained convinced that the proposal was acceptable.
Kirby appealed again to Hamas to accept the proposal, which was laid out last week in talks in the Qatari capital Doha. “Think about what this deal will do for the people of Gaza. It gets them a period of calm and a potential end of the war and the violence and the bloodshed,” Kirby said. “It also gets them, because of the stop in the fighting, an incredible opportunity for all of us — and I mean all of us, including the United States — to dramatically increase the humanitarian assistance that’s getting in,” he said.
